Mask Making

We do molds on our faces for mask making. This is how we do it. We lie, 4 of us, heads together, feet facing the 4 directions. Close our eyes and our partners lays plaster/clothe strips over our faces until there is nothing uncovered but nostril holes to breathe out of.

There is sage. There is chiming, a didj played around our bodies. There is a guided meditation, down to wooded places,..and high to forests above the sky.

The message we are told is beautiful, that we are offering ourselves up to create a template of our own faces. This template to be used to sculpt masks of the archetypes that we are called upon to – and that we choose to accept the call of – to craft a mask for. An archetype will be presented through our own faces. A mirror of ourselves, the sacred, our relationship to it and whatever the perceiver perceives. I am cold and I have to pee. Really bad.

Finally we arrive to the place where we are to meet ones willing to come be made…this place is dry for me. Spiderwoman has taken her seat weeks ago. So this is a little boring. But why? Aren’t there ANY others? But see…there is a little black spider crawling on the edges…

We are called back. There is drumming and singing. I am thinking ok…whatever… and then HE appears.

I’ve seen him before, glimpses of him. I don’t know where, perhaps in dreams, behind the layers in my shamanic journeys, definitely in the folds of magic at the festivals. It is “Myth Maker”. It is HE. He stands before me. I am once again, awestruck that he would come to me. Me. Me. He is wearing a leather mask with curves cut into it the remind me of the “Place where Myths are Made” under the tree in the deep deep lower world. This place I was taken to a month ago to be told that I too can partake in this energy. It is not only for “others”. I can come any time I like.

HE is full of the darkness of mystery. He radiates power of stalking, of love in a hidden way, of an awesome and formidable charge to make stories and bring them forth to the light. (this charge I do not fully realize until the next day). He touches me. For a moment he is inside me and then he is before me again. And then he disappears.

My body is shaking with emotion and a surge of energy.

It is time to come back. Remove the masks. We have been lying on the empty stage for about an hour so I wrinkle my face until the hardening plaster pulls off my face. I want to weep for no reason. I sit, mask in hand, eyes closed still and cry. A bit.

So. There are tears in the inside of my mask.

I am repelled away from the intensity into the clearing, remembering it being referred to as a sacred grove during meditation. I look up at the sky, the towering trees. I am pulled to a white block of granite and magnetized there for what seems an endless amount of time, as waves of energy rush and rush and rush through my body. Oh goodness, this was unexpected..not the sort of thing that happens in one, simple guided meditation.

I cannot move. I am entranced. I’ve been here too long. I cannot think of any place left to go, away from chatting…the stage has become a sacred space and no one is trying to talk to me so I can be there, while Hjeron finishes the last person, lying on it’s sacred floor, face down until I am so cold I am shivering.

I am at the fire pit, blanket wrapped around me while I stare and stare and stare and stare. This energy is not leaving me. I am into it and it is into me in similar patterns of sacred mushrooms and I do not want to let it go. It is not subsiding. So I sit and sit and stare. I am not sure what, how or when the patterns faded.

I know as I write this I could tap right back into it again. I don’t know how long this will be in me. I feel such terror. Terror that this dream, this charge, this making that I longed for so long to be a part of will not accept me when I open myself to it. I gently tell myself to take my own time, that a gift given such as this will not go away.